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Emachines T6212 Constant Kernel Panic

Hello! I am a newbie to Linux, and I would like to run it on my old Emachines T6212. It has a AMD 3200+ CPU and an ATI Radeon Xpress 200 chipset. I get constant kernel panics, and I don't know what causes them, or how to fix it. I am using the bare essentials version of 12.10 and it just randomly kernel panics after logging in. I have tried a plenty of other distros. Please help. Thanks,
Kyle

It sounds like a hardware problem to me. You can try booting with a Linux rescue disk (like SystemRescueCD) and running memtest to test the memory. The other likely suspect is the graphics chipset. For troubleshooting, do these things:

1. post the output of your kernel boot-time parameters:

Code:

cat /proc/cmdline

2. after a panic, check the kernel log for errors:

Code:

cat /var/log/syslog

3. if possible, post more details about the kernel panic - i.e., what specific errors are you getting on screen?

Well, if it locks up before you can run a single command, then I guess you can't. But you can boot from a Live distro and see if that locks up. You can use the Ubuntu CD/DVD, but I would try a Rescue distro (like SysRescCD I mentioned above) if I were you.

So if you boot up w/the Live distro and it doesn't lock up, then you can access the hard drive where Ubuntu is installed and check out the log file. I mentioned the location above: /var/log/syslog

You mentioned you tried several distros. Do they all lock up the same way? Have you tried booting in text mode or advanced mode in any of them?

And I do not know about the errors, or where they might reside.

i am talking about two places where errors will be seen: 1) on the terminal, when it locks up (maybe there is nothing there?) and 2) in /var/log/syslog